Since ever, I wanted to do research in physics. Although this seemed to be just a dream in Romania, I did my best to make it come true. I followed the lectures of a very good high school, I participated every year in mathematics contests  and won a lot of pries and honors, I learned special relativity and read a lot of undergraduate physics and, finally, at the end of high school besides my  normal Baccalaureat diploma, I become a certified computer programmer (I had  C/C++, Turbo Pascal, Fox Pro and Qbasic for 8 hours/week during entire high
school).

After high school, I applied and got admitted with fellowship to two  universities in Romania: West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Physics and  the Politechnical University of Timisoara, Faculty of Control engineering and  Computer Science. I attended lectures at both of them as a full-time student  and I met the necessary conditions for getting a fellowship at both for three  semesters. However, I got only one of the fellowships according to the Romanian law. Besides the undergraduate lectures I had to attend, I had the pleasure to  follow two high level lectures in General Relativity delivered by prof. Dumitru Vulcanov in the Physics Department and two lectures in Differential Geometry  delivered by prof. Mircea Puta in the Mathematics Department (these lectures  were aimed to students in mathematics, not physics, but I found them very  useful). During the first two years of college, I published together with  Prof. Matei Stefan and Glita Sebastian (also student) a small book on  mathematics aimed to 2nd year students in Computer Science and a small paper  on special relativity in a Romanian Journal.

My dream of doing real research started to come true with a ERASMUS scholarship for Germany I won for completing the third year in physics there. In Germany,  the first thing I did was to knock on Ed Seidel's door at the Max Planck  Institute fuer Gravitationphysik (Albert Einstein Institute), Golm and ask him  to allow me to do some research in his group and visit the library. He let me  in and offered me a lot more than I asked. A few days later I was working in my office at A.E.I. on a real research project. The aim was to compute embeddings  of black hole surfaces in flat space. At that time I could just dream that this what was going to be my diploma thesis at the Freie Universitat. The dream came true. This was really a great opportunity since German students start working on the thesis at the beginning of the 5th year or (usually) later and I was only a 3rd year student (A German diploma is roughly equivalent to a US Master). After completing the requirements for the thesis, I intend to put make the entire work public by submitting it to the Los Alamos E-print Archive. Also I will submit it for publication to the printing house of the West University of Timisoara or to  the Mirton Printing House. I hope in this way I will help the next generations  of Romanian students that are going to write diplomas abroad. Personally, I  would have been happy to read such a diploma before coming here. I could not  find one. I hope they will.

Meanwhile I had to take lectures at the Freie Universitat Berlin. The  requirements for the ERASMUS fellowship were to complete lectures for 30 ECTS  credits each semester. The main problem was that all the lectures were in  German and I have learned German only after I was appointed the fellowship,  6 months before coming to Germany. In spite of this, I completed 42 credit  points in the 1st semester (36 at the Freie Universitat and 6 at A.E.I. Golm) and 41 in the 2nd. I took more lectures because I wanted to meet not only the  requirements for the ERASMUS fellowship, but also the requirements for the  German diploma. The lecture on "Particle and Fields" given by prof. Hagen  Kleinert was not required by neither the ERASMUS program or for the German  diploma. I took it because it provides a introduction at an advanced level in  Quantum Field Theory. Although introductory, the lecture was really hard and only I and two more students were able to pass the course. Another valuable  thing I have learned in Germany is the German language. Now, I can finally  speak it! At the end of a diploma program, each student is required to take  4 exams and write a thesis. So far I took and passed three of the exams, two  with 1 (A) and one with 1.3 (still A). I plan to submit the thesis in January, after submitting a paper to Physical Review D or Classical and Quantum Gravity and I hope to take the last exam in February. In the summer semester, I plan to continue doing research at the AEI with Ed Seidel and also take some more  graduate level lectures in Quantum Field Theory at the Free University Berlin  and String theory at the Humbold University. These lectures are not required for any degree program I am involved in. However, I expect the standards in  your University to be very high and I expect to be well prepared before  starting the Ph.D program there.

This is a summary of my past achievements. I hope to continue on the same way as a Ph.D. student. I want to continue the research in General  Relativity I have started at the Max Planck Institute in Golm  (Black hole perturbation theory, Computing wave forms for the gravitational  wave detectors, numerical evolutions of black hole space-times). I also want  to improve my understanding of Quantum Field Theory. I already took a lecture  in the field at the Freie Universitat Berlin and I intend to take one more before starting my Ph.D. This is, however, not enough. I would be happy to take some more graduate lectures and do research in this field during my Ph.D.

I first discussed about applying to Caltech with Curt Cutler, a professor from  the Max Plank Institute were I work who was Kip Thorne's student in Caltech.  He encouraged me to apply for a Ph.D in USA and specially to Caltech. I took the final decision at the LISA Conference 2000 were I the pleasure to meet Kip Thorne. We spoke for five minutes in one of the brakes and afterwards we had dinner together. We discussed about my research project in Golm and about a  little paper I've written just for fun and never published on the possibility to use the Hawking evaporation of very small black holes to power a spaceship.  We also discussed about my plans for the future and he encouraged me to apply  to Caltech. After the conference, Kip gaved me a book on Classical Physics he  was working on. I enjoyed reading it and I send him a few comments about the  book. I was surprised that Kip answered most of these mails. I also looked on  the web page of his lecture on General Relativity and I printed and solved  some of the problems. This is how I have learned about Caltech. I find the  lectures very exiting and I hope one day I'll have the chance to take part in
them.